Pennsylvania Election Audits and Recounts Explained • Spotlight PA

Pennsylvania’s 67 counties are required to audit their results after each election to ensure accuracy.

The first audit they do is the ‘statistical sample’, which is commonly called the ‘2% audit’. This is a legally required recount of 2% of the votes cast in a county, or 2,000 votes in total if that number is less, which is usually the case. The ballots are chosen at random.

Counties use a different method to count ballots during the audit than they originally did. Some do this using vote tabulating machines that differ from those used on Election Day, while others count ballots by hand.

Counties must complete these recounts before the deadline to declare their election results, which this year is November 25. Some provinces have already completed the audit, while others will do so in the next two weeks.

This is not the only check that provinces carry out. As a result of a 2018 settlement in a lawsuit filed by Jill Steinthe Green Party’s presidential candidate, Pennsylvania now conducts statewide risk-limited audits.

With the 2% audit, an election administrator might choose to examine ballots from just a few precincts. While that review could reveal a problem with those specific districts or the ballots cast there, it won’t reveal much about the election as a whole.

A risk mitigation audit aims to check the margin of a race to confirm that the reported winner actually won. The process begins with Pennsylvania Department of State employees rolling a set of ten-sided dice to generate a random number, which is fed into an algorithm that determines which ballots to examine by counties. That process ensures that no one knows in advance which ballots will be recounted, making it impossible to manipulate the results.

If a race has a smaller margin, the algorithm requires more batches of ballots to be reviewed to verify the outcome. If the margin is larger, fewer batches need to be checked.

The races to be included in this year’s risk-mitigation audit will be announced on Wednesday and the dice roll will take place on Friday, a State Department spokesperson said. Counties where a batch has been selected have until the November 25 certification deadline to re-count.

When a race goes to a recount

The presidential contest in Pennsylvania was decided by a margin so large that the outcome became clear shortly after Election Day. The same cannot be said about the battle for the US Senate.

While the Associated Press has called the race for Republican Dave McCormick based on an analysis of the votes yet to be counted — including provisional ballots cast when a voter’s eligibility is in question — incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey had not yet conceded Tuesday.

McCormick had 48.93% of the vote to Casey’s 48.5% as of 5 p.m. Tuesday, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State report. website.

Under Pennsylvania law, there is a recount automatically activated when the result of a race is within 0.5%. Pennsylvania’s top elections official, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, will order the recount by Nov. 14 unless the trailing candidate requests that the process not continue the day before at noon. The recount must then begin on November 20 and the results must be submitted to the secretary by November 27.

However, recounts rarely change the outcome of a race.

FairVote, a nonprofit organization that advocates ranked choice voting, analyzed nearly 7,000 races statewide between 2000 and 2023. 36 recounts were found during that time, of which only three led to a change in the outcome.

“All three reversals occurred when the initial margin was less than 0.06% of all votes cast for the top two candidates,” the report said.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of State, there have been seven statewide recounts since the 0.5% rule went into effect in 2004. Nobody changed who won.

Three voters in a district can also request a recount if they believe there has been fraud or an error. Such a recount applies only to ballots cast in the electoral district, which is the smallest electoral district, usually only a few hundred voters and sometimes no larger than a city block.

Although there were fears that such recounts would be weaponized this year delay in certification of resultsso far that has not happened.